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March 29, 2016
Can we use an infrared camera to tell us how much groundwater is coming out of the side of a cliff?
By Erin Mundy – a plain language summary of part of her Masters thesis Groundwater is an important resource, with approximately 2 billion people around the world using groundwater everyday. Although most groundwater is beneath our feet, sometimes groundwater leaks out of stream-banks, hill sides and cliff faces – this is called groundwater seepage. Current scientific methods are not able to measure the amount of groundwater that leaks out of …
December 15, 2014
How to peer review: skill-building in a grad classes
I teach how to peer-review in graduate class because I think it is a core skill for any professional. I first demystify peer-reviewing and academic journals, and answer questions that all students have about these topics that they have heard about but rarely learn about using this: I describe my personal experience as a manuscript submitter, reviewer and associate editor. And then I outline the structure and types of questions …
June 16, 2014
Two great science communication tools for conferences and teaching: smart screens and cell phones
A few weeks ago at the European Geosciences Union in Vienna I learned about two dead-easy and great science communication tools for conferences. These are great for any conference hall or meeting, but could be just as easily be used in the classroom to make a more exciting in class research presentations. For better or worse, most of us are carrying them (or looking at them!) right now: a smart …
May 12, 2014
What busy profs would like to read in a blog post about active learning
During a great workshop today on active learning in engineering at McGill I asked two questions (using Socrative) , of the audience. Here is a summary of 24 answers I received: 1) I would like to read blog posts about: activities for large classes (18% of people) activities for small classes (30% of people) technology in active learning (22% of people) wacky or creative ideas for active learning(30% of people) …
Surprises and lessons learned from co-teaching an inter-university graduate course
Contributed by Grant Ferguson, University of Saskatchewan [email protected] In an earlier blog post, Tom discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of co-teaching a blended graduate course to students at McGill University, the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the University of Saskatchewan. This course wrapped up last month… we definitely learned a few things during its delivery, some of which were surprises that we hope you can learn …
March 25, 2014
Active learning in large classes: a gallery ‘walk’ with a 100 students
Active learning in large classrooms is difficult but not impossible – here is one example of an active learning technique developed for small classrooms, the gallery walk, which I have successfully re-purposed for a class of 100 (but I see no real upper limit on class size with the modified version of this activity). “In Gallery Walk student teams rotate to provide bulleted answers to questions posted on charts arranged …
Co-teaching a blended class across universities: why? and why not?
This term I am co-teaching a graduate class in advanced groundwater hydrology with Grant Ferguson (University of Saskatchewan) and Steve Loheide (University of Wisconsin – Madison). In co-developing and co-delivering this course we have learned a lot – I’ll start here with our initial motivations and write later about our pedagogic decisions, software tools and reflections after the course. It is mostly win-win for students and professors, but I’ll describe …
